As things begin to go awry on board, one of the crew comments "Remember the Shenandoah." This refers to the tragic crash in a sudden thunderstorm of the USS Shenandoah airship on September 3, 1925 in southeastern Ohio, which would have been a widely known event.
The party's "Ballet Mechanique" scenes were shot in the Multicolor two-strip process and required extra-intensive lighting. No print containing the color sequence is known to survive as of 2022.
The airship exterior sequences were planned to have been shot in Multicolor, but the film was not sensitive enough for the high-speed photography required for the miniatures.
This was the most expensive film that MGM made in 1930 and its costliest musical until The Merry Widow (1934).
Director Cecil B. DeMille had left Paramount in 1929 in pursuit of better financial arrangements for his films. He signed a three picture deal with MGM. This was the second of those three films, the first being Dynamite (1929). After this film flopped at the box office, DeMille finished the deal with The Squaw Man (1931), another bust, and he then returned to Paramount.
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